Longevity + Jing
Through a Chinese medicine lens, then through my own personal lens
I’ve just returned from three days somewhere I’d consider pretty special.
It combined a few of my favourite things in a perfectly packaged, cute and compact way.
A gathering of inspired and expert knowledge on the idea of longevity, on one of my favourite islands, Ibiza, amongst nature, during my favourite time to visit, with one of my best friends.
I mean, it doesn’t get much better than that.
I was invited to ear-seed the members, guests and staff of Soho Farmhouse Ibiza. Whilst there perusing the itinerary, I noticed that there wasn’t a speaker on longevity through a Chinese medicine lens, so naturally I started thinking about what I’d say if it were me presenting it.
So here it is.
There is a particular concept in Chinese medicine of the ‘essences’, of which we have three (also known as treasures: Jing, Qi and Shen. Qi is one you may be most familiar with, at least from hearing it, but Jing? It’s slightly on the elusive side for non-Chinese medicine people, yet arguably the most ‘important’, should you ever be given the unenviable task of having to rank them.
Jing is the essence of life, the source. While I was ear-seeding, I spoke of the kidneys as the foundational battery pack, which is true but only part of the story. The kidneys house our Jing, and Jing is essentially our life essence in a finite capacity. Its quality and quantity are inherited, so we are not all born equal. What we are born with is out of our hands, but how we spend the remaining allocation is very much in our hands.
The idea is that we can continually create a daily amount of energy through our breath and our food and drink, which we convert into the Qi and Blood our body needs for daily life. Some activities use very little, some exhaust it quickly, and any energy we spend beyond that daily amount, we dip into our Jing reserves for. Over time, if we are continually dipping into these reserves, well, I think we can do the maths. And sometimes the simplicity of basic maths gives us most of the answers, I find.
But what is considered over-extending (and therefore indulging in the dip)?
Well, this is where the more cosmological Daoist thought comes into it. This will be a nutshell explanation, as it’s far too large a topic for me to attempt here. Dao means ‘the way’. In a very simplistic manner, I would describe it as the path of least resistance through the natural processes. We are all subject to the natural order of coming into physical being and then gradually releasing our parts until we are no longer physical. Nothing in nature is exempt.
Chinese medicine uses yin and yang, and later the Five Phases, to explain this. It’s all jargon to the lay person, and you don’t necessarily need to understand it, but the very basic idea is very important.
The idea is that wherever there are obstacles blocking, overloading or under-nourishing any part of this process, we are expending more energy than is usually required. The deficit may seem small on a daily basis, but over time it creates a huge imbalance between energy used and energy created, and so more than the normal amount of our Jing reserves gets used. This is why in Chinese medicine we tend to think of longevity more as preserving our reserves, as opposed to creating longevity in any other sense.
If you’ve followed me a while, hopefully you’ll have noticed that I talk about Wu Wei, the art of intentional non-doing. It sits so nicely alongside the longevity question. By doing less that is in the way of the natural order of things, we spend our energy much less quickly, and on the right things. It really is a question of energy in, energy out.
It’s easy to assume that living the most Jing-preserving life is the most beneficial way to live, but I would not like to think of it that way. The more fixated we are on this being the goal, the more we move away from the natural flow itself, creating yet another blockage or lack. Believe me, I’ve been there. It’s a continual weighing up of the benefits and potential pitfalls of every decision that lets us discern whether the natural flow is unfolding. And the only way we can even do this without dipping into our Jing is by gradually becoming present enough in our own bodies to discern what we are actually feeling. Difficult stuff.
Difficult stuff that requires practice. Small pockets of stillness to begin with. Allowing emotions to move through us. Taking what we need from every situation presented to us, without holding on to what’s not useful.
I’m not pretending that I’m any good at this myself, but I do believe this is the way to real longevity.
We are surrounded by health information, and it only goes to show that information is not necessarily power. Discernment is. I used to love buying into the new health fad, the supplements, the gadgets, the treatments. I’ve been well into the idea of optimising health for over 30 years, I’d say, starting at 13 when I declared myself a vegetarian in a very carnivorous Asian family.
One of the things I’ve come to realise in recent years is that my very strict routines, and my hard line on the way I, and anyone else, chose to live, were in fact a manifestation of a deeper blockage I’d carried from childhood. Which is why, ironically, in the past few years, as I’ve become able to make choices that feel more aligned in the larger areas of my life, my grip on controlling the idea of longevity (for both myself and those closest to me) has loosened.
I take the fewest supplements I’ve ever taken, despite having a cupboard full of them. I’m more flexible in my approach to my diet, allowing more of the ‘treats’, and my alcohol intake has increased, but to what I would call a ‘joyful’ amount. On paper, it may all look like less longevity, but my energy levels, and my general feeling of flow and living with the Dao, have increased tenfold. My feeling is that I’ve released so many obstacles that I simply require less energy to live my chosen life, and hopefully I’m not dipping into my Jing reserves as much as I did before.
I don’t consider the abundance of health information as noise any more, and it doesn’t provoke anxiety in me. I simply listen with curiosity (you never know what lands if you never listen), and let it waft past me catching the fragments that fit.
So if you’d like somewhere to start, here’s my takeaway, start small.
Connect to something. A person, yourself, nature. Basically, another living thing.
Create something for absolutely no reason other than the creation itself.
Make around 70% of your intake of anything sustainable. Food, drink, visual, audio or atmospheric stimulation, things on a sustainable trajectory, ie you could do them forever and they would not eat into your Jing.
Be still where possible, to allow your discernment muscle to see what’s going on.
This is why I have a very strong belief that leaning into Daoist views, and creating a life where stillness is seen as a productive option, increases our ability to make flow-like decisions more naturally. So no matter how much is going on around us, we can listen, pluck out the parts that speak to us, and leave the rest to float away. Maybe they’re for someone else.
I came home from the island with the parts that were mine.
Love Aye x
Clinics / Wed - Fri / Brighton + Lewes